


Colours

by JaceRMontague



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, Eventual SwanQueen, F/F, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 23:07:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6170281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaceRMontague/pseuds/JaceRMontague
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soulmate AU</p><p>People grow up unable to see the colour of their soulmate's eyes.<br/>When, eventually, a person meets their soulmate, they are able to see the colour they've been missing their entire lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Colours

**Author's Note:**

> this isnt my usual style of writing but I hope you all like it regardless.  
> Comments and Kudos are, as always, welcome. I will answer any comments any of you have.  
> If any of you are following my multi-chap Bare Knuckled, i apologise that its taking so long to post a new chapter but im hoping chapter thirteen will be up within the week.

Regina sat there in her bedroom. The child had been playing dolls in her room until her mother had burst in and told the young girl that playing was for the uneducated and that if the girl wanted to be as powerful, strong and influential as her mother then Regina would stop playing like the uneducated did and would read a book and do the mathematics work that the girl had been set by her private tutor the morning prior. Regina was five. Regina didn't care for being powerful or strong and she didn't even know what influential meant, nevermind whether she wanted to be whatever that word meant. Regina didn't want to be any of it if it meant that she became like her mother, she hated being stuck inside when she wanted to be outside and she hated doing schoolwork when she wanted to play with her doll set and take photographs - a hobby that Regina's father Henry had prided her on, he had told her she was a skilled photographer and the young girl had taken this to heart.

Now that Cora had left her daughter unsupervised once more, the child was day dreaming. What had started as a thought as simple as 'I wonder what the colour green looks like? Is it as pretty as I think it is?' had become a fully fledged fantasy within the girls head where she met her soulmate and finally saw the colour green. She wanted to see what the trees and the grass and flower stems looked like. She wanted desperately to know if the dress in her wardrobe was as beautiful as her mother said it was. But to see the world as it was truly meant to be Regina would have to find her soulmate and fall in love. Regina was five. Regina didn't know what a soulmate truly was. She didn't know that a soulmate, once found, would not just make the world more colourful but more enjoyable, would make the world so much more worthwhile than it would ever be without a soulmate.

Miles upon miles away, and a few years later, Emma Swan, an eight-year-old with long blonde hair, green eyes, a slight stoop in  her posture like she was constantly ducking or awaiting the next blow to her body was sitting in a windowless box room in her new foster family's home, gently rubbing her right shoulder and collar bone, trying not to blink becuase that meant her face would sting even worse than it was currently. She hated the family and they hated her. She wasn't sitting inside because she wanted to, because, if given a choice Emma would be outside, playing in the grass, enjoying herself. Emma was sitting in the boxroom because she'd been locked in. Her foster father had asked Emma to hand him the brown handled-screw driver. Emma knew that she could not see the colour brown and that she would have to wait until she met her soulmate before she could see the colour of treetrunks, chocolate, her best friend Lily's hair. She had, over her eight years learnt to diffrienciate between the greys that were truly grey and the greys that were only grey because she could not see the colour brown, but she had faultered for a second too long when looking at the handles of the screwdrivers she was supposed to be handing her new foster father and when he shouted at her to hurry up, she had passed him the wrong coloured screwdriver. Infuriated, the man had stood up and beat Emma with the screwdriver before locking her in the clusterphobic room.

By the time Regina was seventeen, she had had the mantra 'Love is weakness' imprinted on her brain. Her mother had realised not too long after Regina's sixth birthday that her daughter could not see the colour green and knew that this meant that Regina would be dreaming about meeting her soulmate for this is what Cora herself had done when she was Regina's age. However, she wanted Regina to be successful, to not need to fight for her place in the world just because of her heritage. Cora wanted Regina to be strong and smart enough to be able to hold her own within the world despite being Latina and if that meant that Regina had missed out on friends and fun growing up and was aware that love was weakness then so be it. Though, by the age of seventeen, Regina was still daydreaming of finding the love of her life, the person who would make the world better for her, especially now that she was painfully aware what a soulmate was. Every decision the teenager made was clouded by both 'Love is weakness' and the girl's desire to meet her soulmate.

Emma, being Emma, being fifteen, being an orphan, being abused, being different, being too tall, being too clumsy, being on the run whenever she had a chance to escape before inevitably found and dragged back to a group home had begun to believe that she would never find her soulmate because if the people who had made her couldn't love her enough to stick about why should some stranger? Emma was sick of the world. She was sick of living and hating the life she had while knowing that someone out there had the ability to change her life.

Regina hated her life by the time she was twenty-two, she hated that she was now the CEO of the most successful law firm in America when she wanted to be a photographer, an artist, a traveller, a chef, a designer, a writer, a volunteer worker, an absolutely anything else than the CEO of this business. She hated that her father had died when she was eighteen and that she had been stuck under her mothers thumb until her mother, too, died when Regina was twenty. Regina was lonely and was desperate to love someone - not just her soulmate, she wanted someone to love unconditionally, and so she had applied to adopt. Regina also hated that she couldn't just walk out on everything and live her own life purely because her mother's legacy would be that Regina held her place in the world. And surely Regina couldn't break a death-bed promise she had made to her dead mother, could she?

Emma was running, why is it, that Emma was always running from something? This time though, she was running towards something. She had been a bailbonds person since she was twenty. She had become a bailbonds person after an eleven month stint in prison for a man who was evidently not her soulmate considering that Emma had gone to prison, given birth to, and consequently given up, their son, and after all that, she still couldn't see the bloody colour brown.   
She smacked into the man she was chasing and pinned him to the floor. 'Another idiot man, another not-my-soulmate.' she thought to herself.

Regina walked round her studio, listening to her six year old son as he chattered excitedly about his mother's art show that would be happening that night. She had resigned from the law firm when she was twenty-six, four years after adopting Henry, after realising that her mother had only told her to hold herself, her place, in the world. She never said in which industry Regina should be holding her own within. And so, after this realisation, Regina quit her job as CEO and began focusing on her dream to become a world-renowned photographer. Two years later, she was not yet world renowned but was making waves within the art world and was making it as a photographer to the stars in New York.

Emma walked into her empty apartment on her twenty-eighth birthday, it was times like this that she wished that she hadn't given her son away, that she had met her soulmate by now. She was nearing thirty and had nothing to show for her life apart from a Boston apartment that she was behind on rent in and a trail of mistakes and hurt. She blew out the blue star-shaped candle on the singular cupcake - both of which she had bought for herself. She was half tempted to throw the cupcake into to the bin, but the cake had been pretty expensive and she was hungry and had nothing else to eat in the apartment. As she conceded that she would, in fact, eat the cupcake, her door was knocked. She rolled her eyes and walked to the door, half joking to herself that maybe, just maybe, it'd be her soulmate and that she'd finally catch a break.

Regina paced her mansion, when she turned thirty she had moved herself and Henry out of New York and into a small town on the coast. Once she started making it big, she was in demand and her brief relationship with some big-name film star she had worked with on a photoshoot had put her in the limelight and, for once in her life, on the otherside of the camera lens. Which she hated. She hated it moreso when she and Henry were harassed several times a day by the paparazzi and so, she decided, she would move into a quite area with security and work from home. The only issue was that she had to travel often and, with Henry now in school and settled, she couldn't bring him with her which meant that she missed him often and the childminder was known for spending more time with Henry then Regina. Now at thirty-two she had broken the mould and become world-renound, her work that amazing that people, the rich and famous, would come to her in her dainty little town because if they couldnt be photographed by Regina Mills, they wouldnt be photographed at all. This also meant that Regina had finally found a balance between work and home life and spent more time with Henry than anyone else in the young boys life, flying out of state rarely, and only for the most important of clients. She had flown out and back to New York, two days prior, leaving Henry with his favourite childminder, Ruby Lucas, and a promise that she would be returning five days later. However, the night that Regina had landed in New York and mid-way through photographing some promotional shots for the latest silver-screen block buster, Regina recieved a frantic phonecall from Ruby stating that Henry had gone missing and Regina was on the next flight home.

Emma drove down the highway, pulling off when she saw the sign that stated that Maine was an hour away. She got closer to the little town that the young boy in her passenger seat had told her that he lived in - Storybrooke - part of Emma still believed that he was lying. Not just about the fake-sounding town name but that he was her son. She thought that she would never see her son again, especially since she had opted for a closed adoption, but here she was, driving her son back home to his mother. Eventually, she pulled up outside of a scarily big mansion and saw the silhouette of a woman pacing back and forth, running hands through her hair.

Regina heard a knock on the front door and practically ran towards it, her heart beating frantically, hoping that Henry would be on the other side of the door. She swung the door open and her heart nearly burst at the sight of her little boy on her doorstep. She swept him up into her arms and held him tightly

'Im sorry, Mom. I just had to see my birth mom, I'm sorry.' the young boy said into Regina's shoulder

'Your... Henry wait inside please?' the young boy nodded and raced inside, worried he was going to be told off.

'So you're Henry's birth mother?' Regina asked sharply.  
'Hi.' Emma said, finally looking up, meeting Regina's eyes.

For the first time in their lives, Emma saw brown and Regina saw green. Emma decided that brown was now her favourite colour - but not every shade of brown, just the shade of chocolate that swam in Regina's eyes. Likewise, Regina had decided that she wanted her next art show to be centred around the shade of green that circled around Emma's pupils.

'So you're my soulmate?' Emma asked gently, smiling at the woman in front of her.

All Regina could do was smile, and, after a moment or two, invite her soulmate into her home.


End file.
